Atalanta, devotee of Artemis and defiant of men and marriage, was a popular figure in ancient literature and art. Although scholars have thoroughly investigated the literary evidence concerning Atalanta, the material record has received less scrutiny. This article explores the written and visual evidence, primarily vase painting, of three Atalanta myths: the Calydonian boar hunt, her wrestling match with Peleus, and Atalanta's footrace, in the context of rites of passage in ancient Greece. The three myths can (...) be read as male and female rites of passage: the hunt, athletics, and a combination of prenuptial footrace and initiatory hunt. Atalanta plays both male and female initiatory roles in each myth: Atalanta is not only a girl facing marriage, but she is also a female hunter and female ephebe. She is the embodiment of ambiguity and liminality. Atalanta's status as outsider and as paradoxical female is sometimes expressed visually by her appearance as Amazon or maenad or a combination of the two. Her blending of gender roles in myth offers insight into Greek ideas of social roles, gender constructs, and male perceptions of femininity. Erotic aspects of the myths of the Calydonian boar hunt and the footrace, and possibly also her wrestling match with Peleus, emphasize Atalanta as the object of male desire. Atalanta challenges men in a man's world and therefore presents a threat, but she is erotically charged and subject to male influence and dominance. (shrink)

Rusticus Or The Future of the Countryside Martin S Briggs Originally published in 1926 "Few of the fifty volumes, provocative and brilliant as most of them have been, capture our imagination as does this one." Daily Telegraph "The book is a pamphlet, though it has the form and charm of a book." Spectator Contents include: "So this is England!" Before the Deluge King Coal The Age of Petrol The Future 126pp Diogenes Or The Future of Leisure C E M Joad (...) Originally published in 1928. "A brilliant and provocative volume." Evening Standard "The writing is vivid and good-humouredly truculent." Times Literary Supplement Arguing that many people do not know how to enjoy their leisure time, this volume offers satirical advice on how best to achieve happiness and fulfilment. Highlighting the dangers of a materialistic, superficial age, the author provides practical advice on how to avoid boredom and how to appreciate the true value of life. Perhaps even more pertinent today than when it was first published, this volume is still relevant to twenty-first century readers. 94pp ********************** Hanno Or The Future of Exploration J Leslie Mitchell Originally published in 1928. "His wonderful book, in which he confutes the popular notion that the explorer’s task is finally fulfilled." Morning Post "Stimulating, packed with eminently practical suggestions." Times Literary Supplement Predicting what the explorer of tomorrow would discover, the author foresaw that the Amazonian jungle and the Antarctic would become accessible as never before. He also argued that inter-planetary communication was not far ahead. 84pp Atalanta Or The Future of Sport G S Sandilands Originally published in 1928 "His provocative and most interesting book." Daily Herald "Points out some of the pinnacles of unreason climbed by those trying to separate amateur from professional." Manchester Guardian Predicting a time when sport as a separate human activity, having served its purpose in the evolution of mankind, will cease to exist this volume discusses issues such as blood sports, amateur sports and the role of gender in sport. 112pp. (shrink)

Reseña del libro recientemente publicado de Jeffrey Raff en ediciones Atalanta, que se basa en el estudio analítico (en algunos capítulos comparativo) sobre el concepto del "sí mismo" en relación con el proceso alquímico.

On several vases from the fifth century BCE, Attic painters depicted partly or entirely naked feminine characters, along with various athletic accessories. In some cases, specifically studied here, the young woman can be identified as the mythical heroine Atalanta. The article shows how these pictures are not evidence of real customs, but were intended to arouse the symposiasts who handled the vases on which they were depicted.

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man , Tylor's research on the early history of mankind , Renan's Vie de Jésus , Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia , and Swinburne's notorious (...) Atalanta in Calydon ; it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath , the first meeting of the X-Club , and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’. (shrink)

Tras la publicacion de los aforismos completos de su obra magna, Escolios a un texto implicito, Atalanta presenta ahora el segundo libro que aparecio en vida de Nicolas Gomez Davila. Publicado en 1959 en Bogota, bajo el sobrio titulo de Textos I, este volumen tiene la particularidad, dentro del conjunto de su obra publicada, de ser el unico escrito en prosa continua. Asi pues, el lector puede aqui saborear en toda su extension la eficaz calidad de su estilo. Pero (...) aparte del placer sensual que reporta la prosa de Gomez Davila, este libro ofrece una clave esencial de su pensamiento, pues segun Francisco Pizano de Brigard, en el se encuentra todo el desarrollo de su teoria de la reaccion: el texto implicito al que aluden los Escolios, donde se exponen, sin ningun proposito didactico, las lineas esenciales de su vision antropologica y metafisica del hombre. Cierra el volumen la recuperacion de un breve texto perdido, El reaccionario autentico, que completa y sintetiza su vision filosofica del mundo, que lejos de ser una exposicion dialectica del universo, es el lucido llamamiento de una libertad despierta a una libertad dormida. (shrink)

This paper aims at emphasizing several elements that give shape to the syncretism of the alchemic work Atalanta Fugiens, which represents one of the classic texts of alchemy and continues the hermetic and theosophical trends of the Renaissance. Atalanta Fugiens is of current interest because of its flavor of multimedia essay avant la lettre, as it gathers a series of emblems, epigrams, and al- chemic comments on the mythological Greek-Ro- man corpus in an attempt to order in an (...) emblem- atic book the entire knowledge of humanity, to reformulate in alchemic terms the totality of the spiritual experience of humanity. The book may be compared both with a palimpsest and with a blending of elements of different natures (visual and auditory). However, what is most important is that the book exits the “Gutenberg galaxy” and enters territories that only today – thanks to computers and the Internet – are we able to explore. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece by Kirk OrmandAndromache KaranikaKirk Ormand. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a text in fragmentary form that poses questions about its date, performance, and genre context, is put in new light in the rigorous study by Kirk Ormand, who traces the main themes (...) and mythological details of the Catalogue’s intriguing storytelling. With the external façade of a recounting poem largely connected to heroic genealogies, the Catalogue has attracted significant scholarly attention. Ormand breaks new ground by focusing consistently throughout his book not solely on matters of poetic production but rather on the “end result” and the social forces that produced and proliferated the poem. The key themes of contest, rape, marriage, and changes in the institution of marriage become the template on which the mythological structure of heroic genealogies is set. Ormand sees them not as a static platform but as the moving axis that problematizes female roles as women change home and status. The Catalogue presents largely the consumption of women without ever presenting a female point of view; the female figures are tools in creating heroic genealogies with the birth of the hero as a focal point without much interest in further births or other moments of the female life. As becomes clear from the first introductory chapter, Ormand assumes an authorial stance that is well aware of the oral hexametric epic tradition but is also consciously creating an act of aristocratic nostalgia of the past in the new political frame of the polis.The second chapter delves into much-needed research on the socioeconomic exchange of hedna, a practice often conflated with dowry and aristocratic wedding gift exchange. Ormand carefully disentangles the literary attestations and underlines how hedna was a marker of aristocratic values distinct from other forms of gifts. Influenced by Ian Morris’ view that oral poetry reflects social practices at the times of performance that resonate with audiences, Ormand brings a new understanding of hedna not as economic exchange in a bride-wealth social nexus (according to the anthropological work of Jack Goody) but rather as something that ensures a kind of membership, so to speak, in an aristocratic club. Functioning like a hidden auction, the offering of hedna creates a competitive framework that silently raises the price of aristocratic membership. Displaying and offering more wealth ensures belonging to the elite but also defines the measure that marks and solidifies aristocratic status while raising the bar for others. Marriage offers the forum of competition, and the bride becomes a marker of value (through her beauty) that enables such a kind of gift-giving, and, through it, belonging to the elite. By exploring the historical context and literary attestations of this type [End Page 171] of gift exchange, Ormand presents a convincing case that the Catalogue, an epic poem that can be largely seen functioning as a counterpart of sympotic poetry, has a similar role: within the early context of the rising polis it provides an elite ideology connecting aristocrats to heroes through the nexus of the poetic (undemocratic) device of hedna.In chapter 3, Ormand’s analysis of the story of Mestra, a well-known shape shifter in myth, lucidly illustrates his arguments about elite ideology and how marriage defines female identity in the narrative of the Catalogue. Connections between the female and mobility are of course not new, but Ormand brings a new point of view to a central issue in archaic and classical literature, namely, the implicit struggle between natal and spousal families for the woman (as in the myths of Demeter and Persephone, the Danaids, Antigone, and Electra, among others). In the Hesiodic narrative of Mestra, her shape-shifting and passage from rape to marriage exemplify social tensions and the evolution of social and legal thinking on citizenship, endogamy, and exogamy and ultimately the oikos as a unit of the polis.The fourth chapter shifts toward the fluidity in oral poetic production and culminates in a parallel reading of Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes as a recasting of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne MayorAlison KeithAdrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv + 519 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Adrienne Mayor is a historian of classical folklore and ancient science and the author of several books whose subjects lie at the intersection of classical myth and ancient history (...) with archaeology and the history of science: an exploration of monsters and heroes in the repertoire of classical myth as a response to the discovery of fossils in The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton 2000); a wide-ranging collection of evidence for biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs (New York: Overlook Press, 2003); and a sympathetic biography of Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009); as well as an investigation of indigenous North Americans’ accounts of fossils, in Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton 2005). Like her earlier volumes, The Amazons brings together an extraordinarily wide array of evidence, uncovered through prodigious research across such diverse fields as classical mythology, ancient history, and contemporary archaeology of the central Asian steppes, and the results are presented with her trademark narrative brio. As with these earlier volumes, moreover, Mayor has an agenda in The [End Page 174] Amazons: here she seeks the historical reality that lies behind the ancient Greek myths of barbarian warrior women; and she finds it in the recent archaeological discoveries of female warriors interred on the central Asian steppes from the Caucasus to western China.Mayor sets out her premise in a prologue that takes its bearing from the myth of Atalanta, whom she dubs “the Greek Amazon” (1–13): her project is to investigate where the Greeks might have encountered real women warriors like Atalanta, capable of besting men in footraces, on the battlefield, and in the hunt. Her study falls into four parts: Part 1 (17–59) asks, “Who were the Amazons?” and identifies ancient Scythia, with its many horse-riding and horse-herding nomadic tribes, as the homeland of the Amazons. Part 2 (63–246) surveys the archaeological and scientific evidence for female warriors among the nomadic tribes of the central Asian steppes in prehistoric and historic times. In this section, Mayor considers the evidence afforded by the bones of buried nomad warriors misidentified as male (because of the weaponry and horses accompanying the burial) when they were originally excavated but recently recognized as female as a result of newer scientific techniques of examination (chap. 4); the body armor found in the steppe graves, in a discussion which has recourse to comparative ethnography, yielding a rich history of breast suppression (chap. 5); the tattooing practices of the historical nomadic tribes of the steppes in relation to the iconography of Amazons’ tunics and leggings on classical vase paintings (chap. 6); ancient accounts of Amazons’ dress (chap. 7), including their partiality for trousers (chap. 12), sexuality and reproduction (chap. 8), drugs, dance and music (chap. 9), hunting technologies (chap. 11), weapons and warfare (chap. 13), all in relation to the archaeological and historical evidence of steppe women’s practices in these arenas. She even presses into service ethnolinguistics in order to argue that the names of the Amazons can be traced back to a common origin in the Eurasian steppes (chap. 14; cf. Appendix of Names of Amazons and Warrior Women in Ancient Literature and Art from the Mediterranean to China). In Part 3 (249–353), Mayor turns back to “Amazons in Greek and Roman Myth, Legend, and History.” Here she retells the most famous Amazon myths, of Hippolyte and Heracles [sic] (chap. 15), Antiope and Theseus (chap. 16), Penthesilea and Achilles (chap. 18), and the Athenian Amazonomachy (chaps. 17, 19); and classical accounts of their historical counterparts—the dalliance of Thalestris and Alexander the Great (chap. 20) and the love of Hypsicratea and Mithradates (chap. 21). Part 4 (358–429) abandons the Hellenocentric perspective of Part 3 to investigate the evidence for Amazonian women “Beyond the Greek World... (shrink)

Her name was Flavia Thalassia and she came from Ephesus. She won the stadion for parthenoi at the Isolympic Sebasta Games in Naples during Domitian’s reign in the late 1st c. C...